The Children's Book - A. S. Byatt [105]
Not all, said Toby Youlgreave. You might dream—he hesitated delicately—that you were loved by someone—or that someone dead was living after all, it was all a mistake.
In that case, said Tom, waking would be as dreadful as dreaming the bad dreams.
Charles wondered if Toby’s secret was to do with love. With the sex instinct. He kept coming back to it, though that might be because he got so wound up in poetry all the time. There was an awful lot of love, and sex, in poetry. It made Charles’s skin prick, but he wasn’t sure he cared for it. Flather, he thought, using one of his nanny’s old words. Flather. Toby’s secret is some sort of flather.
His own essay had been a rather perverse, but certainly clever, demolition of the dream of the good life in William Morris’s News from Nowhere, and the kind of communities associated with it, who wore hand-printed skirts and ate vegetables. He wrote that the dream of Heaven had always worried him because it was so boring—there was nothing to do—and the dreams of Heaven on Earth, going back to the land, living in vegetable gardens and little plots of flowers, with no machines to be seen anywhere, struck him as a sleepy refusal to look at real problems and make real plans about what to do. He quoted Morris against himself
Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time
Why should I strive to set the crooked straight?
He was indeed, wrote Charles/Karl censoriously, “the idle singer of an empty day.”
His anger stirred in his sentences, making them alternately blunt and incoherent. Toby Youlgreave set about benignly to sharpen and point them. He said these points were perhaps best not made in a scholarship exam for a very privileged school.
Toby waited for a comment—from Tom, not Charles—and Tom said, thoughtfully, that he feared that was what he was, a dreamer. Toby Youlgreave looked at the darkening cottage window in the late afternoon, and said, almost to himself, that that was what they all were, living so pleasantly, dreamers. Have some treacle tart, he said, mocking himself gently. I made it specially for you two. How do we get out of dreamland? Hic labor, hoc opus est, he said.
Tom took the entrance exams, that July, in a kind of dream. Olive was worried for him, but he was himself unworried: maths was maths, Latin was Latin, he knew what he had to do as he knew how to throw a cricket ball or steer a bicycle. He wrote an essay on Keats—“My Favourite Poet”—for Marlowe, and an essay on “The Characteristics of the English” for Eton. Marlowe accepted him: Eton rejected him: both schools accepted Charles. It was faintly disturbing to Tom to be rejected. He was not used to it. Charles’s parents decided he would go to Eton. They bought him a new bicycle. Charles slid away, in some anxiety, to consult Joachim Susskind. He said it had to be against his principles to go to Eton. Susskind, surprisingly, encouraged him to go ahead. The world was imperfect, he said. One boy could not change it by refusing to be educated. He should go to Eton and learn to argue, and observe the ruling classes at their most absolute, and consider how to thwart their purposes. We must be wise as serpents, he said, quoting Jesus Christ, who was, he claimed, the first Anarchist, and not adding the corollary, harmless as doves, because he was still thinking of the propaganda of the Deed, and whether or not it was right to strike symbolic blows. Susskind was excited by the banishment of the Anarchist groups from the Socialist Second International, meeting that summer in London. The Anarchists refused political action. Susskind was not sure where he stood on this, either. Bakunin had said Germans made bad anarchists because they wanted simultaneously to be Masters and Slaves. There was a German kind of orderliness to Susskind’s anarchism,